“I signed up for an open mic, for the first time, six to seven years ago. Back then, there weren’t many of these events happening. Up until that night, I had gone to sleep everyday thinking that the world sleeps at 9, because that is what my parents told me. And then, I stepped out and walked into this room, the venue of the open mic and I was blown away! It was a room full of exuberant life, of people talking, drinking and laughing. It’s been a love story ever since; I found comedy!” Thus began Aakash Mehta’s tryst with stand up.
Mehta, who was in the city for a couple of performances says he chose to be a comic, as it is what he does. “A cat hunts and a thirsty baby wants water. There is no informed choice or decision. It is always there, even if you don’t know it.”
But Aakash did not always want to be a stand up comedian. He wanted to study music after school. “A major bout of depression after 12th grade stopped me for applying to music schools. I pursued a diploma in audio engineering from Mumbai in compensation. But that wasn’t enough. Law was sold to me, as my best bet thereafter. I cleared law, forced by ‘we’ll take away your phone’ threats from parents for the first three years and voluntarily in the final years.”
He says studying law gave him multidimensional perspectives to a problem. “I realised that no person is entirely wrong or right and that a problem can be looked at from both sides.” It was in law school that he also began experimenting with comedy.
What distinguishes comedy from other performing art forms? “One, you cannot have an offstage rehearsal in comedy. Two, its reception is very subjective, because laughter is an involuntary action,” he says. The best part of doing stand up for this comedian from Mumbai is, “that moment between a set-up and the punch line. I know what’s coming, but the audience doesn’t. And yet, everyone connects in the end with spontaneous applause and laugh together. For that minute, I have made the room grow smaller.” He says that in that moment, it’s humbling to think that humanity can still come together about something.
Not all performances, however, are a hit. And when he misses, he cannot feel the pulse or connect with the audience. He says that you rarely know what went wrong. On such nights, “I have lost the audience, and I am just going through jokes mechanically.” Aakash doesn’t write down his jokes. “Other comics will probably say that I should. I focus on thoughts. Thoughts must be funny. I go up on stage with just those thoughts.” Once you know the craft of comedy, funny thoughts keep pouring in. “However,” he says “anyone can play Beethoven. But can you express your thoughts like Beethoven, is the real test.” All those sketches uploaded by comics on the internet have gone through many rehearsals and seen many improv performances, he says. “Every pause, breath, expression, stance, are meticulously planned.”
He speaks of how comedy was his defence mechanism, while trying to deal with anxiety. “I am not afraid of you all when I am on stage. Right now though, I think you all hate me. But doing stand up has given me enough awareness to be able to distinguish.”
Aakash’s favourite comics are Mitch Hedberg and Mike Birbiglia. “Birbigla is a storyteller and he has influenced me immensely. Every set of his opens my mind,” he says. Speaking about comics and the censorship conundrum, he says that bigger the audience, more censored and safer the performance. “Nobody is going to jail yet. It is a matter of time though. But I choose to work with reality in mind, because I don’t have faith in the mob outside my house. We comics don’t need much of external checks and balances, because self censorship is a fact- there is an internal mechanism that controls what we say.”
Comedy can only cause catharsis in an individual and not social change, because it lacks antiquity, according to him. He recounts, “after my set on suicides one night, a guy came up to me and said that he had attempted suicide, and that this was the first time he had laughed about it. That is the change comedy is capable of.”
